Gray blueish Amsterdam trip

The trip to Amsterdam happened in a gray and cold day, freezing cold for the most of it.

Things that had to be done were done. People who had to be visited were visited.

My favourite part was visiting our friend's exhibition, only the three of us and the paintings in the gallery.

We like him for many reasons. One of the reasons I like him is because he's an anarchist, and I feel strong sympathy for anarchism and anarchists.

Although he's Dutch, he spent most of his professional life in Africa and South America. And even though he sees himself as an artist, he never went to Art School, he had a science-related profession, retired a while ago.

A quirky character, blunt and charming at the same time.

He's European in every sense of that word, but doesn't subscribe to the Euro-centric view of the world, which I find quite admirable.

But going back to the first reason I like him.

The terms anarchism and anarchists have been massacred for decades so that nobody understand their meaning any more.

The average person picture anarchists throwing Molotov cocktails at government buildings, but nobody reads the poems written by other anarchists. It is even more difficult to imagine is that the same person can bring buildings to ashes and write beautiful poems—but that people existed, exist and will always exist in the future.

Destroying current institutions and collapsing (sort of) working systems appear as wrong, even immoral, at first glance. What people often forget is that in order for the current system to flourish, the previous one had to be abolished.

Now, we approach times in which the current systems are starting to crumble.

Any-way.

We talked about many things. My wife was particularly interested in the life of Muammar Gaddafi (another character mercilessly massacred by Western propaganda), I was more interested in Piotr Kropotkin.

We briefly discuss Kropotkin's work on what he calls “Mutual Aid”. He even wrote a book about it.

I found Kropotkin's work on “Mutual Aid” very close to Ivan Illich's “Conviviality”, the latter being an author I'm way more familiar with.

Some study time will be spent on Kropotkin's work next year, that's for sure. Probably I'll start reading some of his texts the upcoming holiday's season.

And what about the blue-ish part? That was just me. The blue light came from my own eyes, impregnating everything I looked at through the day.

#Life #Travel #Anarchism